[ValVashon]

This is here because it involves installing a program- not running it.

Was sitting outside of Americas Biggest Coffee Chain taking a break from pushing the stroller and having a cup of tea (Espresso carts: be able to make me a cup of tea and I'll patronize you) when a woman came out and remarked to her friend that worked there that she wished there was an Apple expert nearby. I proceeded to introduce myself and then ended up not really being an expert.

Miriam (sp?), a recent "switcher" due to the family acquiring iPods, had trashed iTunes after "screwing it all up". She had a white iBook of some sort running 10.3.8 (?). She had a new copy of iTunes downloaded and on her desktop. I watched her double click on the "box" and go through all the usual steps. After selecting a disk (the hard drive- the only disk) the message in that dialog box said that the installation would take "0" bytes which I thought was strange. Clicking OK or whatever then produced another box which said iTunes and some related things were "disabled", along with them being greyed out. I suggested trashing some preference files but the same thing happened after she downloaded iTunes a second time. In between she downloaded and installed a security update with no problems (restarts both times). She tried once again but then had to get going. At some point she mentioned that she even created another user to try to install it under that user. Might she still have been logged in under the second user (which may not have been an admin account) and gotten this problem? I find it puzzling that no clue is given as to what the problem- like "you don't have sufficient privileges" or whatever. iTunes just comes up as "disabled".

For being a recent switcher, she seemed unfazed by not being able to reinstall a program, and confident that it would be worked out. She said she had always admired Apple hardware and software from a distance, so let's help her out before the bloom wears off and she goes back to fighting with win.ini files.

My final suggestions were to search and post here (I beat her to that); try running disk utility and going to a genius bar.

Val

(sorry this is kind of rambling- I've been up 20 hours or so.)

[Krusty]

Well, I'm not familiar with the error message, but the first thing to do is open Activity Monitor and kill the process "iTunes Helper".

[moki]

Go to /Library/Receipts and delete the "iTunes.pkg" and "iTunes4.pkg" files (you'll need to be logged in under an account that has admin privileges)... basically, these files tell the installers what software is installed. The reason why it says "0 bytes" for the install is because it thinks that the version of iTunes you're installing is already installed... so, nothing to install..

Then re-run the installer, and I bet it'll work for ya.